There’s been a lot of discussion about Kyle Busch approaching 200 career NASCAR victories (across all national circuits, not the 200 top-tier wins Richard Petty recorded), and so it’s not surprising that news organizations had stories queued up and ready to go if he picked up his 200th win in the Xfinity Series race at Auto Club Speedway Saturday afternoon in Fontana, California. However, one of those organizations sent their story out too soon, declaring Busch the winner before the race ended.
Busch would eventually go on to lose to Xfinity Series regular Cole Custer (who was competing on his home track), and it was the Associated Press that sent out a much-too-soon alert, so that led to a widely-syndicated error. Here’s a look at the news alert they moved via Jay “Jayski” Adamczyk (formerly affiliated with ESPN, now independent), in what looks like a screenshot of The Washington Post:
Someone at the Associated Press hit the publish button a little early. pic.twitter.com/RPplVJL6Ue
— Jayski (@jayski) March 16, 2019
There are a lot of news organizations that subscribe to the AP and have their Twitter feeds set to autotweet stories, so that led to some embarrassing tweets from media outlets. Most were quickly deleted; screenshots and commentary on some of those are seen below.
https://twitter.com/FlatBaggy/status/1107069728047185921
https://twitter.com/GrilleyRacing/status/1107059486152409088
It appears that the AP moved a correction to that alert as well. From Gary Torres:
Things all went wrong for Busch with a bad pit stop with 35 laps to go, which dropped him to 14th place. That included a penalty for an uncontrolled tire:
Even more trouble on pit road for Kyle Busch. He's currently P.14. 32 laps to go. pic.twitter.com/mBGo4akH1b
— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) March 16, 2019
Busch fought his way back to second in the end, but didn’t have enough to catch Custer. Even if the AP previously thought he did.
[Jayski on Twitter]
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.